


i'll leave the murder scene

by youcouldmakealife



Series: in taking it apart [10]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 04:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1027053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcouldmakealife/pseuds/youcouldmakealife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s getting better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll leave the murder scene

**Author's Note:**

> Just to make it clear, this is a series in progress. Again. Thank [tumblr](http://youcouldmakealife.tumblr.com/) and peer pressure. 
> 
> Title is from The Editors' "Distance".

He’s getting better. 

He’s not getting better in a cure way, not in a ‘soon this will be gone’ way, this will never be gone, this shit will stick with him until the grave. No one uses those words, exactly, or that sentiment, but it’s pretty fucking obvious. There’s a small chance of it disappearing, growing slimmer as the weeks pass. That’s what they use, ‘small chance’, and he isn’t ready to bet on single digit percentages, that’s not the man he is. So this is it for him. But he’s getting better. He’s ‘adjusting’. Symptoms are ‘alleviated’. He’s learning a whole bunch of words that completely mask what’s being said, because doctors don’t like to come out and say that your body’s betrayed you, that no matter what you do, you won’t be the same. 

It doesn’t mean the headaches have stopped, but he can’t count on them like trash collection anymore, which is one good thing. The dizziness has ebbed, unless he pushes himself, does something he’s not supposed to do, because he’s practically out of his skin with the things he can’t do. He can’t do fucking anything anymore. He’s functional. They like using that word, as if it means jack all other than the fact that he has to live with it, that it’s his life and it’s just something he’ll have to get used to. That he can be a real boy, most of the time, but they don’t know shit, because they tell him his lack of energy’s understandable, but he was a professional athlete. Not being able to get out of bed some days means his world has fucking ended.

He stays in Edmonton because they tell him to. Tell him it’ll take time to find him someone decent back home, and management’s still fretting over him like he’s theirs, like they’re the ones who concussed him. They hired him, and he did his job, and shit happens. They could wash their hands of him, but they don’t, which is more than he can say about most of the franchises he’s worked for, who stop liking him right around when he gets his hands dirty, the exact fucking thing they hired him to do, and the exact thing they didn’t want blowback from. 

He goes to his appointments. He goes to whatever the fuck they ask him to, not because he’s expecting some sort of cure, this isn’t the kind of shit they have a cure for, but because he can’t lie to his mother, and he can’t tell her he didn’t go, can’t upset her like that. So he’s a good little boy, and he goes to every fucking thing he has to, even if they never tell him anything he doesn’t know, which is that he needs to get used to it.

He bounces through therapists so much it makes him dizzy, psychotherapy and psychology, men and women, all with that cultivated listening look that puts him on guard every time. He’d quit completely, he wants to quit completely, but the team doctors call once in awhile, ‘just to check up’, still obviously concerned even when it isn’t their job to be, and he’s beholden enough to them that he goes, practically running through Greater Edmonton’s therapy base before he finds someone who doesn’t actively make him defensive.

He grows to almost like her, or at least dread going a little less, until he slips and mentions Liam, something totally innocuous except for the fact he freezes after like he’s been caught holding. She latches onto that then, worries it like a fucking bone between her teeth, says Liam’s name like a talisman, growing visibly frustrated when he retreats. He doesn’t blame her, with some of the shit he’s found himself telling her, against all reason. And then there’s suddenly one word bringing him back to stone silent and contrary. He can’t blame the curiosity.

Him and Liam may not have been a secret, exactly, but Mike isn’t saying anything, has locked it up inside him so he can hold it there. It’s not healthy, he doesn’t need a shrink to tell him that, but it’s his own fucking life, and he can dwell if he wants to, there’s no one who tells him he can’t. He keeps the kid locked up tight.

*

Mike hasn’t told anyone he’s sticking around in Edmonton beyond the necessary, his mom, who laments him not being closer every time he calls her, his brother, who doesn’t say anything about it, at least to him. People tend to assume he’s back in Minnesota, and he lets them. It’s no one’s business, and he doesn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to see his former teammates, not when they’re former, not when hockey isn’t a part of his life anymore. He can’t even watch a full game, let alone fuck around on the ice, and the last thing he needs is the reminder.

Rogers figures it out somehow, maybe the team doctors, maybe management, who the fuck knows, he’s good at getting that kind of thing out of people, has that trustworthy face. He catches Mike off-guard on a Sunday morning, and before Mike can protest anything he’s being dragged out to fucking brunch, of all things. Brunch is an idiotic concept, can’t decide what it wants to be, and Mike takes pleasure in ordering just about everything that he knows Rogers can’t eat on a mid-season diet. Rogers doesn’t even blink, which takes some of the pleasure out of it.

Mike wishes he was immune to Rogers’ trustworthy face, but he isn’t, not really, so it just takes twenty minutes of Rogers being unassuming, not asking Mike anything in particular and telling Mike about his baby, apparently trying to bore him to death, before Mike cracks, gives him the briefest rundown of shit he can, just so Rogers will quit looking at him like that. If therapists could figure out how to mimic Rogers’ face, they’d have success rates through the fucking roof.

Rogers doesn’t say much, just lets Mike run out of steam, until coffee’s down to the dregs and Mike’s mopping up yolk with his crusts, plate clear in front of him. When Mike’s run out of anything worth saying, he asks the question he’s been holding in since Rogers showed up at his door.

“How’s Liam?” he asks, keeps his eyes on his plate, eats his last bite, mostly for something to do.

When he looks up, Rogers is stone-faced, and Mike knows him just well enough to know he’s absolutely furious, that he’s brimming with it. He’s furious with Mike, and he still dragged Mike out of the house because Mike clearly needed it. Because he’s the best person Mike knows. 

“Good,” Rogers says, clipped, and Mike doesn’t know how he feels about that. “Likes his team. He’s playing well.”

Mike gathered that much, knows Rogers knows more than that. “Roge,” he finally says, when Rogers says nothing else.

“What do you want me to say?” Rogers asks. “He’s okay. He’s got a boyfriend. The guy’s not a hockey player, thank God.”

Rogers isn’t the type to take the lord’s name in vain, is a good Christian boy. He’s probably thanking God on his knees every night that Liam’s found himself something better. If Mike believed in a higher power, if Mike was a better person, well, he’d probably be thanking him too. 

As it is, the last bite sticks in his throat. 

*

In April the Oilers bow out of contention, Detroit locks up a playoff spot, and Mike finally has everything waiting for him in Minnesota. Not Duluth, not with the specialists his doctors have finally gotten referrals to, somehow. It’s not home, but it’s closer than Edmonton is, by over a thousand miles, and his mom found him a good house to come back to in St. Paul. 

Everyone’s busy taking care of him, like he’s an invalid, and it’s insulting, but he couldn’t do it, he doesn’t think, couldn’t come back and just figure it out, who he needed to go to, what he needed to do, so he’s reluctantly grateful. More grateful when his mom tells him she shut his brother down on a ‘welcome back’ party, because the last thing in the world Mike wants is to get off a plane and then humor a bunch of people who just travelled hours to see his sorry ass mug, out of pity or old times or whatever.

Rogers still has his name on the Rogers Family Update list or something, Mike keeps getting pictures of Baby Rogers with Rogers and Lady Rogers, and doesn’t let him bow out, practically hauls him out for dinner the Oilers’ first game against the North Stars, an exhibition one, switches to showing him pictures on his phone instead of via email.

Otherwise, Mike pretty successfully retreats. He’s just far enough away to be a pain in the ass for the old gang to travel to, so it’s mostly his mom and his brother. His mom has a key for emergencies, uses it to harass him, and his brother isn’t much better, but other than that, he gets to stay pretty removed. Nothing’s really worth the effort; he can’t go out to bars, go get laid. He can’t drink, and it’s no fun to hang out with drunk people when you’re sober. You can’t have sex with them and keep a clear conscience, feel like you’re doing anything but taking advantage. He may not be a good person, but he isn’t that kind of guy. 

His mom keeps urging him to go out and find someone, but what the fuck is he supposed to do, hit on someone in the produce section of the grocery store, waggle his fucking eyebrows in the neurologist’s waiting room? It isn’t worth the goddamn effort. He doesn’t care enough. He misses sex, dimly, but just about everything else about it is irrelevant to his life, and he prefers it that way. No one taking up the bed, no one kicking him in their sleep, no one playing Florence Nightingale when it gets to be too much, or getting spooked by it. It’s better the way it is. 

*

Rogers calls him again just before Christmas. Sounds wrong on the phone, even Mike can pick that up, and he ain’t a sage.

“Fitzy called me,” Rogers says, after getting through the pleasantries, the asking about each other’s mothers, about the wife and kid. Wife’s pregnant, kid’s adorable. Shit Mike could have gotten from the Rogers Family Update.

“Okay,” Mike says, after a minute. He doubts that’s rare, Liam’s a bit of a clingy shit, and Rogers is like a big brother to him. Unless he called with bad news and Rogers needs Mike to kill someone on his behalf, Mike isn’t really sure what the fuck this has to do with him, beyond the fact that even using that godawful nickname puts salt in a wound that Mike ends up tugging open every time it starts to heal.

“He asked if I had your number,” Rogers says, flat, and Mike doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s not sure what he should do, or what he wants to do. He’s blank.

“Mike?” Rogers asks, after a minute.

“I’m here,” Mike says.

“I have your number,” Rogers says.

“You just called me on it,” Mike says. “No shit you have my number.”

Rogers sighs audibly. “Do you want me to give him your number?”

He says it like pulling teeth, tense, reluctant. Like he’s praying Mike says no, but he’s asking anyway because Liam asked him to and he can’t say no to the kid. Mike understands that feeling.

Mike thinks about it, the glimpses he’s seen of Liam, twenty-two now, baby face melted away, so much more put together. He got the spark he needed in Detroit, is young and talented and starting to learn how to control his temper, almost poised. He knows this because he’s a masochist, or he needs validation for his choices, he’s not sure which one, so he checks in on Liam sometimes, just to see how things are shaping up. Thinks about how every single time he does that, he lives with the ache for days.

“Fuck,” Mike says, and Rogers’ silence is just about all the agreement with the sentiment he’ll get. “Give it to him.”

“Mike,” Rogers says.

“You goddamn asked,” Mike says. “Give it to him.”

He dreads it, the whole thing, dreads the day he’s going to pick up and hear Liam, but when it comes down to it, he isn’t any better than Rogers at telling the kid no.


End file.
